1. Field
The present invention relates to the computer field, particularly to web application testing; and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for cross-browser testing of a web application.
2. Description of the Related Art
The last several years have seen explosive growth in the number of web applications which facilitate business activities or provide service, either internally or externally. Meanwhile, a great diversity of web browsers have been created and made available with variant capabilities on different platforms. To realize the most of business values, it is usually a priority to ensure web browser compatibility for a web application. However, there are considerable features that are not specified in detail in standards, which results in some implementation-specific interpretations. What's more, some vendors intend to add browser-specific extensions. Even different versions of the same product may behave inconsistently in some cases.
Different interpretations and behaviors across different browsers and versions bring heavy burden to the development of browser compatible web applications. Functional verification tests are often needed to be executed on several popular web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, to make sure that the pages have similar appearances and functions in different browser environments. A lot of duplicate testing efforts are involved, being unable to test on different browsers simultaneously. Though some test automation tools may help to some extent, testers are still required to operate the test tools in different browser environments. What's more, it is not easy for testers to capture the differences between the test execution results on different browsers, and this requires the testers to have very high skills and to pay a lot of time and effort. In addition, since the testing for one browser may change the server environment, that is, executing an irrevocable action, e.g., deleting some record in a database, the server environment needs to be set repeatedly, which brings further burden to the testing work.